I think GW put out great products, if not the best products as far as miniatures go. I admire them for releasing an entire plastic or resin range. Something I wish more companies would do. I detest metal miniatures, but that is for another topic.

Mantic just comes off as more personal than GW. GW has that typical big company ego. "We are just to big a busy to dwell with you peons" attitude.

Perhaps it's just the result of Mantic being small, and that's how small businesses are, but I appreciate when a companies reach out to their fans.

Be it youtube, facebook, or forums. Something I love about FFG and the company that produces Infinity (just can't remember the name off the top of my head).

Mantic also seems to be making a game for gamers. Tons of miniatures at a cheap price. Their limited edition miniatures are not so limited. New players like myself have the chance to still get them via the mantic point system. More often than not a company just gives you the finger which is a turn off, particularly for new players such as my self.

Wish more companies would follow Mantics' point system for Limited Edition minis.

Infinity had a limited edition mini at Gen-Con about a year or 2 ago, fan did not appreciate the exclusiveness to the mini. The company acted on the voices of their fan base and made it a regular release. Same happened for a game I play called Tannhauser, there was a limited edition mercenary miniature later released as a regular mini. You don't hear very often of companies listening to their fans.

Lastly, their rule book was available online. I knew what I was getting into before I bought it. I did get to read the WFB rule book from a friend and it was over my head, seemed like more time referring to the rules than playing the game to me. But if I didn't, I would have a hard time justifying spending 80 dollars blindly not knowing if I would like the game.

Once again I will refer to FFG products and Infinity. Infinity has the rules online, read them. Love them. Bough miniatures. And I bought the book. They did not lose money by posting the rules online. For the amount of color and pages the book has it is cheaper to but the book than it would be to print it out and put it in a binder.

FFG posts rule books for 90 percent of their games. There is probably a reason why nearly half of my gaming bucks each year goes to FFG.

They are personal. Great communication. Great products both material and game play. And I almost always know what I am getting before I buy.

I got this with mantic and not GW.

Oh, and Mantic never tried to sue me over at Board Game Geek for posting a home brewed Orc faction for a game called Space Hulk because I posted images of their Orcs I used and link to their web store so people can buy them too.

the reason i chose kings of war over warhammer fantasy was purely made from a rules point of view.like the world GW created for it's fantasy, but the rulesare just to much. even if you play 10 battles i don't think one knows all the rules without referring backto the rulebook again and again.with kings of war i was even confident enough to givedemo's at the fanatic today, after only having it played4 times in total.

and as you mentioned, i like mantic as a company for givingsomething back to it's "customers" like the mantic points,free rules and even encuoraging people to come up with their own stories for their gaming systems.

I've never been much on the gaming side of miniatures. I've always been more of a painter. Nothing competition or display level. I just paint for enjoyment.

That being said, WHF or WH40K never really tempted me. Honestly, I considered the organic models too cartoonish and the mechanical models never appealed. Never thought I'd like plastic models. I worked in injection molding 16 years so it tends to make em dislike plastic of any sort.

But the KoW models were cheap enough to give it a shot. Now, I've got about 200 figures in the works. Mantic models have features and proportions that are more akin to what you would get from a classic miniature company rather than a game-oriented company. Hard to explain properly, but there it is.

Low prices, well-balanced free rules and army lists which are regularly updated in response to community feedback.

Game with a high emphasis on strategy and tactics as opposed to rolling buckets of dice and hoping for the best. Simple rules that aren't the size of an encyclopedia and take a third of the time to play that WHFB does.

I would respond to this, but it's more why I'd go with Warpath and not 40k.Simply put, I haven't played many games of 40k lately as the tactical diversity versus the rules complexity is pathetic. I also was getting a little tired of the doom and gloom in every background piece I read.

I think Kings of War is good. I think Warhammer is good.

The metagame of warhammer is constantly changing. Sometimes I wonder if that is why people are still playing it, but even some fairly stalwart gamers I know seem to be getting tired of the changes. Personally I think 8th Ed isn't that bad if you comp almost every 'final' spell in each lore.

I was actually first attracted to Warpath in the Alpha mode. I liked what I saw and looked into KOW. So, now, I am a devoted fan of KOW and Warpath and Mantic. I still have tons of GW stuff and I might even play a few games, but I am having way more fun with KOW. Also, the number of "experts" watching and offering their "expertise" has dropped dramatically. Always a good thing when gaming. It keeps me from contemplating violence, like strangling the "expert" with his own tongue!

Hmm I cant say that I chose one over the other, I have been collecting and gaming since my early teens (WFB II ) and have a LOT of minatures.

I have not bought stuff from GW for more than 8 years, prefering to buy from e-bay or indpendants, as an ex employee I know how they are scalping us, the customer and want tham to have as little of my hard earned as possible.

Since Mantic was spotted on my radar I have watched them with ever more intrest, as they remind me of GW in the early (fun and pleasant) years when they were a growing company run by gamers for gamers who had a sence of humor with regard to the world background (Just look up some of the old regiments of renoun backstorys to see what I mean).

With the advent of WFB VIII (or the crap edition as I call it) I lost what little love I had left. Luckily KOW had come on the scene, and my games group have quite taken to it despite it still being in the developement stage.

I like that Mantic listen to their customers and use that input into the games and worlds that they and we are creating (my claim to fame is that I helped to decide on the name of the Twilight Kin at the openday after asking Ronnie about the multiple names that had been allotted to them).

I like that mantic as a company want to sell us stuff at a reasonable price and that they recognise that higher prices dont equal higher profits.

I like that their games are simple yet not simplistic, and are fun to play.

I like the communication about new releases and stuff in developement, and the WAY that that information is put out. They dont style themselves as impossible all powerfull gods on a hard to reach mountain topor godly lair, but real accessable people, who are just as excited about the stuff that they are producing as we are.

I like the fact that I could get in my car and drive to Nottingham and probly chat to the MD and buy some stuff after looking about the factory/warehouse.

And most importantly I like the fact that Mantic makes me feel like I am a valued customer (who feels like its 1985 and that I am 12 again!)

Lastly I feel that Mantic is a company I would like to be part of because it feels like they care about what they do, how they do it and what people think of them, though I think the only way this is likely to happen is if I win the lottery, in which case I'd happily invest in them.

This will seem like I'm just talking about why I like Mantic, but it will eventually answer the question.

My friends and I had gotten more and more tired of WFB. We loved playing huge fantasy battles, but the constant swing in army styles and the changes in rules from edition to edition (that didn't fix anything) were bothersome. Since we normally only played wargames a handful of times a year, remembering all the various rules was a bother. It was more of a bother when you'd be remembering a rule from a previous edition. And then, there were so many times when the rules were unclear that we were all getting really disenchanted. It was to the point that our annual Nerdvana fest, which was originally started specifically play WFB, saw a Nerdvana where absolutely no games of WFB were played because it wasn't fun. Playing a huge battle was an exercise in frustration, and it would take an immense number of hours to finish.

Then add the ever creeping cost of GW minis and a sense of disquiet was buliding.

Over the course of this time, GW also produced LotR, and I liked the game pretty well, but what I really, really liked were the miniatures. Natural proportions. Weapons that could actually be used by the model carrying them. Aha! And I remembered how long it took for me to finally talk myself into liking the Citadel style. And with one fell swoop, GW had completely disenchanted me with their products.

Along comes rumor of a company called Mantic. I found their website and signed up to wait and watch, listening to the sound of blowing winds on the webpage, and got to see a picture of an elf appear over time. The elves didn't enchant me, but I bought some to support a young company. Then a guy I had jousted back and forth with on Warseer was working sales for Mantic. He sent me a sprue of skeletons to check out and I was utterly hooked.

I loved the new minis, and wanted to play, but I didn't really take a shine to any of the games out there. I was looking at the Conqueror ruleset (which is pretty nifty) but was thinking about writing my own set of rules and playing around with the idea to have a cool game to play. And just as I was starting (and seeing how hard it can be), Mantic announced they were doing a rule set and Alessio Cavatorre was doing it. So I figured I'd sit tight.

The rules came out and I was instantly hooked. They weren't perfect, but they were simple, clean and (mostly) clear. I demoed the game for our group and within 30 minutes, everyone knew how to play. Then we'd play a game, finish it, tweak the armies and play again in the same amount of time we could have played 1 game of WFB. Add to that the fact that creating army lists was much faster, and the whole game just worked well.

When I want to play a wargame, I want to spend minutes on a list, and a little while playing a satisfying wargame. KoW does this in spades. It's not flawless, and there are still a few issues, but it's a great, fun game even with those issues, and it has won over our entire group as our wargame of choice.

I guess I'm just echoing the thoughts of others but for me it was two fold really....

About 12 months ago my 2 sons wanted to "paint models like Dad" and the thought of buying and letting them build and paint GW models (they were 7 at the time) felt like giving them £20 notes and watching them make paper aeroplanes. I was in Hobby Craft with my wife one day when I saw Kings of War models that even at Hobby Crafts inflated prices seemed cheap. I picked up the free Journal they had in store and had a look on the Mantic website when I got home.

I loved the models so much I bought a Dwarf Army for myself along with some Undead and Elf models for my boys.

All the guys at my game club played (and still do play) WFB but because having 2 kids and a job and everything that goes with it I just never found the time to really get to grips with WFB. Even the guys who play it regularly still play with the massive rule book on the table and constantly refere to it throughout their games.

I found the KOW rules easy enough that I could learn to play by reading them (rather than having to be taught them like WFB) and even my boys picked up the rules no problem. Now as I dont play as often as I'd like to I can still play KOW without having to refere to the rules every 2 seconds and still have loads of fun playing.

I do still love some of the GW models however I love the Mantic ones too. I'm currently building my own Undead army and I'm loving the sculpts.

I'm struggling to get some of the WFB crowd to try the game as they are very hardened GW fanatics however I'm sure over time this will change and I'm looking forward to having my first fully painted army on the table in early 2012.

last saturday i gave a demo of kings of war at the fanatic, and even (old) warhammer players liked the game, mostly because it was much simpler and faster then warhammer.even managed to get a kid know how to play it with just 1 demo, while at the start he said he didn't know the rules at all.

I like that the rules lend themselves to using other mini's, and the mini's lend themselves to using other rules.

People show interest at the LGS whenever the rare group comes in to play Warhammer, Warmachine, or Hordes. That interest pops like a bubble when they see multiple large rule/faction/codec books and hear the players brag about how they've invested hundreds of dollars in their armies. I think KoW will be able to hold that interest with it's 50-page rulebook and insta-armies under $100

I've been in the fantasy gaming hobby for 26 years now, even working for GW back in the good years of 89-99 (I like to think it all went downhill after I left ). Anyway, while I collected and painted and gamed in the instore campaigns, I never really gamed at home. Painted - yes. Gamed, well lets just say the divorce that came in 99 was in part to me painting all the time but that's a story for another day (and which you can read in my novella available at all good Amazon outlets )

But I digest...

A couple years back I wanted to get back into the hobby and after selling a kidney and several pints of blood I bought the boxset Island Of Blood, and the hunky-chunky rulebook. Jump forward in time several months and nothing was painted and I'd read about ten pages of the rules, gotten a bloodloss infused headache and gave up. Remember, I used to teach people how to play this for a living and even I'd lost interest (as well as a chunk load of scratch).

But then I stumbled across Mantic and Kings Of War. Gorgeous models that look real and not like a Hanna Barbera character, rules that make sense and allow players to play each other and not the rules plus multiple ways to enter the Mantic hobby - paint set with models, FREE rules, box set with it all, FREE rules, box of soldiers - oh, and did I mention the FREE rules?

When I showed Lucy the models and a brief demo of the game using the FREE rules she said: "Right. Get me some Elves to kick your ass with!" When I showed her the WFB rulebook she'd said: "WTF?"

Need I say more...?

And now, nearly two years later I have 1500 points of Undead, 1500 points of Elves, 500 points of Dwarfs ALL PAINTED, plus 1000 points of Orcs to paint in the new year and DKH Green Menace all painted. We game every week, and even better than that, I'm writing stuff for Mantic.